Just like constructing a beautiful building, the key to a customer-centric in-app strategy lies in building an incredibly sturdy foundation.
By focusing on one step at a time and ensuring each step is well-planned and executed, we can create a strong and reliable framework for elevating product adoption across different user types and at different key points along their journey!
Laying the Groundwork - Identifying the Top Three Customer Personas
In building construction, architects carefully analyze the site and lay the groundwork before proceeding.
Similarly, we delve into user data and feedback to identify our top three customer personas—the Decision-Maker, the Product Owner, and your Standard User. Each persona plays a crucial role in supporting the structure of your product’s success.
The Decision-Maker - The Architect: The decision-maker, like an architect, holds the power to shape the project's direction. To win them over, provide value proposition documents, case studies, and materials that support any ROI reporting you may have in your solution. Show them the blueprint of how your product meets their strategic goals.
The Product Owner - The Project Manager: The product owner, akin to a project manager, oversees the implementation and expansion process. Empower them with comprehensive training materials and guides to ensure they manage your product like a skilled project manager, making them indispensable assets to your cause.
The Standard User - The Foundation: Though less visible, the rest of your users serve as the foundation for your product's long-term success. Like a strong foundation, they offer stability and loyalty. Utilize fun, bite-sized video tips and personalized tool-tips. It is incredibly important to show them features that speak directly to their needs, but also to build a memorable relationship with them since they may not be in your solution every day!
But wait!
It should be said that within each of these personas, you can probably further segment or prioritize based upon the nuance of your product.
For example - you can consider segmenting ‘Standard Users’ by their engagement frequency, distinguishing between Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Users.
While we won't explore this today, it's essential to recognize that even Weekly or Monthly Users have varying preferences and needs! By segmenting users based on their usage patterns, you can tailor your enablement materials even more effectively to match their individual engagement levels.
Reinforcing Stability
Enhancing Support Documentation: A well-built structure needs continual maintenance. Evaluate your support documentation to understand how you are posturing your solution towards different personas.
While you don’t need to create ‘one-size-fits-all’ support documentation, could you be creating ‘lite’ versions of pages for those ‘lite’ users? Adding anchors to pages and links to those in-app? Could you create videos that offer a persona-specific walk-through for one of the first features they’ll use?
Like reinforcing walls, these improvements solidify the customer experience and add a personalized, human touch to their digital experience!
Gainsight PX as the Adaptive Architecture
An adaptive architecture adjusts to the occupants' needs based upon specific contextual needs, which is just what you’re able to do with audience rules.
Once you have started to manage to do this within PX - or maybe you already are! - it will be key to analyze the results of your enablement efforts and iterate. Utilize funnel reporting to see how your efforts are paying off and, if they aren’t measuring up to your hopes and dreams, adjust accordingly and continue to monitor via a dashboard.
It will also become key to not over-engage with your users, so ensuring you are managing your engagements with labels for these different user-types or even orienting around specific workflows/ feature adoption initiatives.
What now?!
As you embark on implementing these strategies, we recommend focusing on one key persona - the Product Owner.
Given their operational and strategic position, they play a critical role in driving product adoption and have decision-making authority, making them a perfect starting point for your enablement efforts. Making their life easier should be a top priority (if it isn’t already!)
Begin by identifying the key features that are crucial for adoption and retention for this user leverage retention analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of user behavior.
This data-driven approach will unveil the landscape of feature engagement, highlighting which are essential for successful product adoption. Once you have done this for your core user, replicating across other personas becomes that much easier!
Happy PX-ing!